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How Many Drinks Are Actually in Different Size Alcohol Bottles?

If you’ve ever had to figure out how many bottles of alcohol to buy for your dinner party or how many drinks you’ve had over the course of an evening, you know that sometimes the math can be difficult. I’m sure you’ve found yourself asking: What is the standard size of a drink? How much alcohol is that? How much liquid is in each different bottle size?

Breathe! All you need is a little basic math and background knowledge to figure this out. Most importantly, you must remember that in the U.S., a standard drink has 14 grams of pure alcohol. Don’t get into a tizzy if math isn’t your thing though. It’s really easy, just start slow.

First, guesstimate how many drinks you’ll need for your party. As a general rule, assume guests will have two drinks during the first hour of the party, and one drink every hour after that.

Number of guests x Estimated number of drinks per guest = Total number of drinks

Next, figure out how you want to divide those drinks among wine, beer, and liquor. An easy way is to just allocate a third of the total number of drinks to each type.

If you’re having a crowd over, you’re probably going to want to invest in a keg. Unfortunately, keg sizes are not standardized.

However, you can have a pretty good idea if you know that generally, U.S. half-barrel kegs are 15.5 gallons and quarter-barrels contain 7.75 gallons. So, if you are using 10-ounce cups, slightly smaller than a traditional 12-ounce bottle, you will have 200 servings and 100 servings of beer, respectively.

Fifth of Liquor

A post shared by The White Bear (@thewhitebearsb) on Jul 5, 2017 at 8:42am PDT

The fact that standard 750-ml bottles are called fifths is a remnant of the past when this measurement indicated that these size bottles were a fifth of a gallon. Now, the 750-ml bottles are technically a metric fifth, which is 1 percent smaller than its Imperial counterpart.

That being said, what you really need to know is that mixed drinks have a 1.5-ounce (45 ml) serving of liquor per drink, so a 750-ml bottle will make about 16 drinks.

For the math, you’re going to simply need to divide the number of liquor drinks needed by 16 to know how many bottles to buy.

Mini Liquor Bottles

Those fun little bottles that you get for party favors sometimes are 50ml. That means that they are only slightly over the size of a standard shot. So if you find yourself with one of these and no mixer, that’s okay.